hmm? what's being over dramatic got to do with it ? I'm talking because blizzard always takes their time in fixing whatever it is that needs to be fixed , history has shown that and you can't deny it.

We've just had the biggest class overhaul to happen to any class and is ever likely to happen, and you accuse Blizzard of neglect? If anything you could argue that its a good thing those talents are so low impact because its allowing all the rest of the changes to bed in. Don't get me wrong, they are questionable and anticlimactic but you have to look at the bigger picture.

We've just had the biggest class overhaul to happen to any class and is ever likely to happen, and you accuse Blizzard of neglect? If anything you could argue that its a good thing those talents are so low impact because its allowing all the rest of the changes to bed in. Don't get me wrong, they are questionable and anticlimactic but you have to look at the bigger picture.

yes, I'm not saying we're neglected but the overhaul has occured, originally it took blizzard quite some years to notice that the warlock class mechanics is flawed and to fix it, I'm not saying I'm not happy with the changes ( although some problems arise ), but what I said was, now that this overhaul took place, the chances of getting more attention at this point in time on the 90 talents etc is very slim indeed.

In a budget oriented system where a company has to fix or improve some flaws in it's system, which way would you think is more efficient for the company ? fixing a reactor that could compromise the system or fixing the light-bulb in one of the rooms you just painted yesterday ? which would you do first?

To be honest ive called all 3 of the lvl 90 talents "joke talents" since they nerfed AV since it interacted with dark bargain for huge amounts of damage, even then i classed the other 2 as jokes since they were announced. People all said i was not seeing them for what they really are but it seems alot are finally agreeing.

The talents are crap, it's a general consensus across the majority of the player base. But my take on it is that this might be the opportunity we need to get talents that are worthy of the great warlocks of lore that are thier namesake. As well as possibly addressing some of this classes glaring weaknesses in utility functions "defense,mobility,cc" AND maybe get some "real" talents to excite the player base. What we need is Xelnath to look at this thread so maybe he can start looking at our 90 talent tree as a way to solve some of the class issues that have been discussed in other threads. Im curious to his input on the situation.

The Lock's lvl 90 talents are a fail, pandemic looks boring and unattractive for not Affliction locks, and the demonic gate is probably the worst and useless spell of the game, counting even waterbreath(the idea is great, but the way it works makes it incredibly difficult to use,even for "fun")

While the class in general has been greatly improved, they seems to have stopped working on it at lvl 85, leaving all the new skills very bad designed and full of nonsense.

The mandate for the 90 row was "useful to increase damage in different situations, but not on single target fight"

In 5.1, KJC's cast time nerf is coming down to 30%. MF is the pick of choice for top end raiders and challenge mode players while AV is the pick for people who want to never think about pushing another button.

Pandemic is actually huge for demonology, as they don't have to stance dance Doom anymore.

The mandate for the 90 row was "useful to increase damage in different situations, but not on single target fight"

In 5.1, KJC's cast time nerf is coming down to 30%. MF is the pick of choice for top end raiders and challenge mode players while AV is the pick for people who want to never think about pushing another button.

Under that mandate, I can't really argue - I think the problem people have is whether that mandate itself is good for level 90 talents. On the one hand, something with bigger impact to really look forward to would be nice, but on the other, as I said earlier - there's a risk of it being too big an impact that you miss it too much lower down the levelling curve.

Pandemic is actually huge for demonology, as they don't have to stance dance Doom anymore.

This is exactly that kind of impact. It's huge for Demo for that reason, but it's huge for Affliction too, as it allows you to clip early with no DPS loss for more MG coverage over your Haunt uptime and is thus a significant DPS gain and also adds a lot to the rotation in spite of being "passive" - it was definitely missing at 85 as it has such an impact on the playstyle of both specs.

I'll add to this:
Recovery from BRes as Demo, starting out at 0 Fury is crippling enough, having no instant resummon of a pet and it starts to bring in to question the value of ressing you at all. Could we get the old Fel Domination talent back for an insta-summon rather than the Metamorphosed summon?

Soul Fire's animation with fire at your feet - this wasn't thought through was it? Yes, I moved and broke the cast. More than once.

Sacrifice is too strong though for Affliction at least, and it's very noticably so. I would like to see better pet balance across the board.

Otherwise, I am generally happy with how Demo and Affliction are playing.

In the things I'm not happy with, I would add the enemies that don't die. Not recovering Embers/Shards is a huge hindrance in dungeons. Same with boss staying at 1hp etc. Maybe the gain could work when an enemy disappears/gets out of combat or whatever...

Things I am happy with but didn't expect:

Shadowburn while soloing
Destruction's performance in real situations

(kinda odd to say you expected the spec to suck ? )

Destro was pretty good for questing and can be good in dungeons, but it is almost solely because of the double-shard gain from Shadowburn snipeshots that allows the gameplay to be very fluid (won't be the case during progress). We always start boss fights in dungeons with 4 Embers ready and all the cooldowns to blow, but if we started from 0 the spec would be the worst. If you ever decide to change that, it will be bad.

I'm pretty doubtful about this spec for Challenge modes, where a good mobility is required, especially if you are aiming for the gold medal. I will give it a shot in the next days.

On another note, is there anyone thinking FnB is on par with the other AoEs ?

I agree about flames of xoroth. Ive felt it should just be an ability that can summon ANY pet and be off the gcd. Also pets in general die WAY to fast and that is gonna be a HUGE qol issue for pvp. And I still wish I could use felguard/wrathguard as affliction or destro. Those specs just lack the utility of demo "plus felguard is always fun to play and SHOULD be a lock staple". Gosac is powerful but its not simming as the go to option for all specs nor is it the go to option for pvp so I dont think its much of a problem. More for those situations were pets bug out and im cool with that.

The mandate for the 90 row was "useful to increase damage in different situations, but not on single target fight"

In 5.1, KJC's cast time nerf is coming down to 30%. MF is the pick of choice for top end raiders and challenge mode players while AV is the pick for people who want to never think about pushing another button.

Pandemic is actually huge for demonology, as they don't have to stance dance Doom anymore.

btw, if AV is supposed to be the ability people choose to not worry about having to cast anything , shouldn't it be a passive only ? and shift some active portion to MF?

I'd also like to ask whether the level 90 warlock talents feel subpar to you ? or do you think they're working as intended? pve aside, have the talents been considered for pvp at all ?

imo the problem with the talents for pvp atm are as follow, AV is too low of a damage return for it's duration and single target application , if it was 25% for all enemies in that time window I'd understand, also if AV's nerf was made due to pve abusing it for extra dps, why wasn't the ability changed to only take into application single target damage instead of aoe damage? that way you could've just left it at 50% active, and10 % passive.

additionally, the 5% damage return from the passive is a problem for pvp , especially rated content, where a dot or bleed or pet on the lock could break any team members CC, that's quite a flaw.
I'm glad for the kjc buff, although slight, I still think it's too heavy on the negatives, couldn't it be changed to only work on incinerate/malefic grasp/ shadow bolt without incurring a cast time penalty ? the active could stay the same for all I care.
also I think MF is good for a certain niche, like demo aoe , but for any other specs it seems trivial,are there no chances of having an afterthought concerning that?

Furthermore, I'm ESPECIALLY glad about you having noticed the demonic gateway despawn as an issue, and hopefully will work on fixing it ( just hope it's soon since season is starting in a few days ).

Anyways, overall everything else you've stated seems positive, although the SB : SS thing is strong, I think you should consider the implications of the soul shard system before thinking of changing it imo, after analyzing it you'd see that the amounts you can SB : SS in a fight are rather low, considering you'd want to keep your shards and nightfalls for haunt, as for pvp, we need shards for a LOT of other things, so SB : SS will not occur often, with the SB : port now granting freedom and 50% speed increase, it will be used in high end arena a lot, not to mention the other utility's soul shard provide, as in , pet resummons , and finally haunt for the burst needed , I doubt a high end affliction warlock will blow his shards on SB : SS several times since you'd always want to keep 1 for a resummon, and at least a shard for when you need to SB : port, meaning you'd have to SB : SS at the start, then normal SS and haunt main target,that's 2 shards already, then manually refresh unless you're in a dire situation where you're basically totally locked to the point where you cannot cast anything and SB : SS is your only option, though I somewhat doubt that's an issue here.

I do agree with your reasoning about having lvl 90 talents be "useful to increase damage in different situations, but not on single target fight", but there's simply no impact with them atm if you understand what I'm saying.

The mandate for the 90 row was "useful to increase damage in different situations, but not on single target fight"

I could not disagree with you more. No lock actually likes the lvl 90 tier. We pick a talent because we have to - not because we want to. They are all really unfun. I'm not asking for a dps increase, but I am asking for one talent that is noticeable. I'm sorry, but I think they all currently are terribad beyond belief.

Some locks pick AV because its kind of a passive/active dps increase, some locks pick MF because it makes our AoE a bit bigger, no one picks KC because the cast time penalty needs to be zero or no one ever will. But, no one picks any of our talents because they want to.

You don't offer us choice, you offer us whichever we feel is the least awful. Do a poll or go ask lock individually if you have to, but I think it's safe to say that we universally find our lvl 90 tier somewhere between unoffensive an loathesome. No one is happy about a single talent. I'm not exaggerating here. This is the single worst talent tier of any class in the game by far.

All 3 of the lvl 90 tier talents are bad and not fun at all in my oppinion, i do hardcore raiding on my Warlock and always been a warlock. I do not se any usefull ability that would help me out in PvE except for the 5% passive damage reflect, which is very weak. Btw, if you want players to use KJC then you better make sure that it is better than using Fel Flame on the move, and with pandemic, we can always just refresh our dots early to have 0 downtime on dps when we move if its only for a few globals.

Not happy with Soulburn: Soul Swap? it is what makes Affliction work as well as it does right now, would suck if you change it, and i also enjoy it imensely, would just mean that its gona be destro/demo instead of Aff/demo if you do put a cd on it.

I have got to admit im TOTALLY in agreement that the 90 talents are ALL crap. Im not one for making negative comments but ill go on record to say that its not only the worst tier in the whole lock tree but from what ive seen its probably the worst talent tier in game.

The only reason I picked MF for pvp/pve was strictly because there were no other options. AV just breaks CC's in pvp and the reflect isn't even a slight nuisance let alone any kind of detterent and it doesn't really reflect much damage to make it worth anything in pve either. And as far as it being the pick and forget talent why cant the active get removed and the passive buffed if thats the case cause then at least it would be worth taking.

MF was my pick because my rain of fire circle becomes larger lol. Hardly a worthy 90 talent as it could have just as easily been the baseline size of the original spell

And dont even get me started on KJC, that talent could have helped lock mobility out so much, but even "buffing" it to 30% in 5.1 with the snare it is still a useless talent. Mages have a FAR superior talent "Ice flows" on thier FIRST tier of talents and the other 2 talents "scorch,presence of mind" are so much better that no mages dare to pick it. And the sad part is that most locks would sacrifice thier voidwalkers mother just for a shot of KJC trading places with Ice flows for our 90 talent row "90 talents being the key observation ".

Soulburn Swap is probably the best spell affliction has right now, there are many fights where you can spam it with shard regen mechanics but I don't think that it's too strong.

Other than that it's nice to hear that KJ's penalty is coming down a bit, I think the level 90 talents are pretty good actually, most people seem to miss the point that they're supposed to be a niche dps increase and they all have their situations. I do think AV may have been overnerfed though.